'An American Life'

Published: January 13, 1991

To the Editor:

In her review of Ronald Reagan's book "An American Life" (Nov. 18), Maureen Dowd nicely re-creates the conventional wisdom about Mr. Reagan among those in the capital whose predictions about him -- that he could never get elected, push his programs through Congress, turn the economy around or pressure the Russians to change -- he so consistently confounded.

These same capital prognosticators now busily and anxiously tell us, a la the Dowd review, that this time they have it right -- no kiddin' and for sure: historians will soon share their own unbiased view of Mr. Reagan as the friendly, befuddled instrument of the political geniuses on his staff and the beneficiary of serendipitous events like the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Actually, what historians are likely to see is that almost everything that Mr. Reagan did that worked -- from Reaganomics to the military buildup to the Strategic Defense Initiative to the Reagan doctrine to the "evil empire" rhetoric -- was largely his own idea and accomplished over the vigorous opposition not just of official Washington but of the "handlers" or "pragmatists" the news media so frequently celebrated. That some of these staff types got carried away during their own brief orbital pass through Washington and convinced reporters (confused themselves by a political starburst they never understood and always underestimated) that they were at the center of the Reagan cosmos is no great surprise. Capitalitis is like that, with the current symptoms not at all unlike those seen in the last century when the press echoed the complaints of aides of another President about their boss's distracting habit of telling anecdotes and making quips, a press also aching for a leader who was more in tune with themselves and the capital culture, who saw the "complexities" of governing -- someone like, say, George McClellan.

So just as pragmatism wasn't vision, journalism ain't history. The Eastern Europeans, with an unsurpassed clinical experience in the field, welcome Mr. Reagan as the man who took a saber to Communism. Former Reagan aides like Caspar Weinberger, Martin Anderson and Constantine Menges have written accounts in which Mr. Reagan emerges as engaged, persistent and intellectually formidable. It is how I found him too during eight years off and on as his speechwriting chief and why I hope soon to also present an account showing Mr. Reagan smarter than his critics or his staff, smarter even than I.

All of which someday historians, with fewer holy buffaloes to protect than the current capital cultists, will want to deal with. Even if the talented Maureen Dowd and The New York Times, with which conservatives and neoconservatives still vainly seek a modus vivendi, choose not to. ANTHONY R. DOLAN Washington